For me, who's daily driven FreeBSD in the past, and switched back to it again recently. FreeBSD serves as a refuge from systemd, and the only BSD that is a fairly drop in replacement for linux in terms of software compatibility, as well as the only game in BSD town in terms of support for modern hardware.(though it does significantly lag Linux in this regard still, so YMMV).
As to why I use it over the various systemd free linux distros? Well, there's a couple things. First lot of those distros, like Artix linux say, actually have smaller communities than FreeBSD(I'm guesstimating based on the activity level in their irc channels). The Linux community might be much, much larger than the FreeBSD community, but it's also extremely fragmented.
triggerwarning, hyperbole incoming. Don't bother correcting me, it's a polemic, not a scientific paper
Secondly, for someone like me, who's been using various unix like OSes for two decades, FreeBSD is just a nice, batteries included, well integrated system. Things like jails, Dtrace, ZFS, Bhyve, pf etc. All being in the base install means they're just better integrated with the kernel, and eachother. Most of those things exist for linux, or have equivalents, but they're not all part of the same project. Obviously Dtrace and ZFS originated in Solaris, but they've been made first-class citizens. There's a harmony to FreeBSD that Linux distros lack. Documentation is also very good, all accessible via manpages(no GNU INFO...). And, as I mentioned briefly before. It doesn't have a lot of the cruft that's been added to linux distros over the years(though some of it is available in ports if you want it). In FreeBSD, my experience is actually useful. Things I remember how to do from 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, still work. If I'm on some modern, plug and play linux distro, I have no idea what's going on under the hood any more. All I know is it's not what was going on 5 years ago, which isn't what was going on 10 years ago, which isn't what was going on 15 years ago. The amount of pointless churn going on in the linux space is ridiculous. When I started using linux, what I loved about it was that it was transparent. I could change anything. The system was easy to understand. Yes, it was janky, but it was understandable jank, whereas Windows was janky in an opaque way. 20 years later, Linux is still janky, but nothing is understandable, at least not to my greybeard brain. Systemd takes over a new daemon every distro upgrade. DNS resolving now involves 4 different daemons with 15 different configuration files, there's two display protocols, both broken in different ways, /etc is full of long files written in strange, alien languages, and every file has its own bespoke language. There seems to be 54 different ways to make any change to your system, and all of them are somehow unsatisfactory in a unique way. I just can't, anymore. Enough already.
The mains issues with Linux is it’s just the kernel, and anything is developed in their corner without taking account of the rest. Also, I tend to think the Linux folk in general seem to want to reinvent the wheel every 6 months, where FreeBSD and BSD in general have tendency to make things better from previous work in comparison
Yes I know, but maybe my initial message wasn’t clear enough.
But for me the fact Linux is just the kernel doesn’t make the previous criticisms invalid. The first concerning the development of the different components in sort of echo chamber where no one seem to communicate with each other is directly taken from the Linux Kernel philosophy, the maintainer have expressed in multiple time they don’t care what happen outside of the kernel, in contrast with FreeBSD developers for example
The second point is more towards distribution I admit
To make my long-winded point more concretely, the core diference is really just that there are "so many" Linux developers.
Linus has a pretty firm hand on the tiller of Linux evolution. I counter "don't care what happen outside of the kernel" with his many, many public "never, ever break userland" rants. And many kernel devs and maintainers are employees of companies like Intel, Red Hat, Google, IBM, and AMD that absolutely care about coordinating kernel dev with the bigger picture.
Something like 250 devs contribute to FreeBSD each year. For just the Linux kernel, the number is closer to 5000. There are just way more people working on way more stuff. It is not a surprise to see a more significant halo of chaos around Linux. Coordinating the Linux kernel is herding cats and, even when everybody eventually lines up, there are going to be periods where it seems like everybody is talking past each other.
And while the Linux kernel does have a "release early, release often" mantra, it also touts "trust but verify" and has a strong meritocracy and hierarchy. So I am not sure "no one seem to communicate with each other" is fair. Not just anybody can drop whatever they want into Linux. We also need to remember that shipping the Linux kernel is not the same as shipping a Linux distro (operating system). Actual Linux distros bring kernel versions in according to the philosophy of the distro. Many are very stable and conservative. Others are a whole lot less so (but that is users choice).
Isn't this more telling though? that with vastly less developers they've built a system comparable to linux? This is what happens when you have direction.
"The mains issues with Linux is it’s just the kernel, and anything is developed in their corner without taking account of the rest."
I hear this a lot when people talk about FreeBSD but I am not sure about it.
A LOT of the core Linux ecosystem comes from Red Hat developers for example. If I look at RHEL as an operating system, they have a definite vision for the OS, they take a long-term view, and they invest in development to get it there. My guess is that Red Hat alone employs more devs than work on FreeBSD.
Red Hat contributes heavily to the kernel, the core C library (glibc), the userland (GNU utils), the system supervisor (systemd), the compiler (GCC), the desktop environment (GNOME), the GUI framework (Wayland now, Mesa, etc), the sound system (pipewire), the hypervisor system (KVM, libvirt), and the container system (podman and Flatpak). Red Hat heavily influences the direction of all this stuff with a common vision and they work to implement it as a cohesive expression in their distro. This is a broader swath of what makes the operating system than FreeBSD considers its scope and it is all built to work together.
If you use RHEL, you know it is very stable (static). When Red Hat makes changes, they tell you about them years in advance.
I honestly do not think you can say that FreeBSD is more cohesively developed or better documented than RHEL. FreeBSD arguably has less control over key aspects of the OS than Red Hat does.
I am not advocating for Red Hat here by the way. I am not even a RHEL user. I use Chimera Linux which rejects quite a lot of the Red Hat vision including SystemD and pretty much the whole GNU system (userland, glibc, gcc).
My point is that Red Hat is truly a maker of their own destiny and their distro reflects their vision. They want to move to SystemD. They introduced DRM and KMS instead of the traditional Xorg driver model. They want to move to Wayland. They have heavily embraced the OCI container model. It is all part of their vision and design.
Pragmatically, FreeBSD has to create tools like Linuxulator. FreeBSD is adding support for OCI containers. FreeBSD is adding Wayland support and, as popular desktop environments abandon X11, may have to move to Wayland as the preferred display server. Even the FreeBSD utils have added many options over the years to be compatible with the userland that Red Hat developed. Was 'ls --color=auto' a FreeBSD design? In other words, the Red Hat agenda drives the evolution of FreeBSD (but not much the other way around).
So sure, FreeBSD is more stable and cohesive than the universe of Linux distros. But even BSD has fragmentation. GhostBSD is close to FreeBSD but not quite and would be more different if they had more devs. DragonFly BSD certainly has its own agenda (and again, is held back more by bandwidth than solidarity). The free-for-all in the Linux world is an expression of its size and collective innovation. But how much of this you want as a user is up to you. As many have said, you don't use "Linux", you use a Linux distro.
Again, my main distro is Chimera Linux. The whole point of the name is that it pulls together things never designed to work together (including the FreeBSD userland on Linux). And yet, the Chimera Linux dev team has a very strong vision of what they want their OS to look like and they work very hard to build that into a cohesive implementation. This includes keeping the system and the code small and understandable. It is a goal that you can sanely build the entire system from the ground up. That is why Chimera uses a BSD userland and does not use SystemD. But while they want to keep things simple, they also want "modern" features.
They choose components that fit their vision. Where changes are required, they make them. Where they deem good options not to exist, they invent them (eg. Turnstile, cports). As a user, I get that "solid, cohesive, well-designed, intentional, and heavily curated" experience that FreeBSD users talk about. More to the comment above, Chimera reeks of "looking to preserve tradition while striving to make things better". Of course, it is also still a niche distro with a tiny community (at this point). As somebody said above, FreeBSD may be a better choice for this and other reasons. But Chimera Linux is still Linux and that has its advantages. The box I am typing on uses bcachefs and Distrobox. For me, it is perfect.
Anyway, I apologies for the length. When you talk about FreeBSD vs "Linux", you really have to choose a specific Linux distro for the comparison to be meaningful. Depending on which one you pick, the statements made by @MrArthegnor may or may not hold. At least, that is my view.
I both agree and disagree with comments about Linux choas and churn. That is true of the overall ecosystem of course. But any given Linux distro can be thought of as its own operating system.
You can choose a Linux distro that reflects your own preferences in terms of pace of innovation. Sure Arch has 100 package updates a day and 30 ways to do everything. However, RHEL (or its compatibles) is not that way. You can go 10 years without changing your config files. Precisely because there are so many distros with so many different curated experiences, you can find a Linux distro that matches your own preferences.
And yet all Linux distros give you the hardware support and things like the OCI ecosystem that only the Linux kernel can provide.
Given the above, I wonder sometimes why you would choose FreeBSD over a Linux distro. But your statement that FreeBSD has more users than many Linux distros is a good one. It is also true that, while distros like Arch or Debian have more software in their repos than FreeBSD, the FreeBSD ports collection has a much larger selection than most distro repos. So, overall, FreeBSD does achieve a nice balance. So, that makes sense to me.
As to why I use it over the various systemd free linux distros? Well, there's a couple things. First lot of those distros, like Artix linux say, actually have smaller communities than FreeBSD(I'm guesstimating based on the activity level in their irc channels). The Linux community might be much, much larger than the FreeBSD community, but it's also extremely fragmented.
triggerwarning, hyperbole incoming. Don't bother correcting me, it's a polemic, not a scientific paper
Secondly, for someone like me, who's been using various unix like OSes for two decades, FreeBSD is just a nice, batteries included, well integrated system. Things like jails, Dtrace, ZFS, Bhyve, pf etc. All being in the base install means they're just better integrated with the kernel, and eachother. Most of those things exist for linux, or have equivalents, but they're not all part of the same project. Obviously Dtrace and ZFS originated in Solaris, but they've been made first-class citizens. There's a harmony to FreeBSD that Linux distros lack. Documentation is also very good, all accessible via manpages(no GNU INFO...). And, as I mentioned briefly before. It doesn't have a lot of the cruft that's been added to linux distros over the years(though some of it is available in ports if you want it). In FreeBSD, my experience is actually useful. Things I remember how to do from 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, still work. If I'm on some modern, plug and play linux distro, I have no idea what's going on under the hood any more. All I know is it's not what was going on 5 years ago, which isn't what was going on 10 years ago, which isn't what was going on 15 years ago. The amount of pointless churn going on in the linux space is ridiculous. When I started using linux, what I loved about it was that it was transparent. I could change anything. The system was easy to understand. Yes, it was janky, but it was understandable jank, whereas Windows was janky in an opaque way. 20 years later, Linux is still janky, but nothing is understandable, at least not to my greybeard brain. Systemd takes over a new daemon every distro upgrade. DNS resolving now involves 4 different daemons with 15 different configuration files, there's two display protocols, both broken in different ways, /etc is full of long files written in strange, alien languages, and every file has its own bespoke language. There seems to be 54 different ways to make any change to your system, and all of them are somehow unsatisfactory in a unique way. I just can't, anymore. Enough already.